By TOM O’LINCOLN.
This first appeared
in the
1. Rhythms of revolt
IN
THE late nineties, tumultuous struggles brought down the dictator Suharto.
Today, Megawati is president – backed by the same military. Formally the
country is democratic, but Reuters reports:
Growing numbers of Indonesians are being
jailed for their political views under “draconian”
laws that call into question President Megawati Sukarnoputri’s commitment to
political openness, two leading rights groups said. Human Rights Watch and
Amnesty International said in a statement the convictions were an alarming
development leading up to
It
has gotten worse with the crackdowns after the
How
did such a dismal outcome follow such inspiring struggles?
In
the mid-nineties, conventional wisdom said economic development would bring
democracy to
Former
President Suharto became alarmed about Megawati’s progress around 1994, as she
consolidated her position as head of the previously tame Indonesian Democratic
Party. The dictator Suharto organized a rigged party congress to get her
dumped–but she and her supporters resisted, occupying the party headquarters in
the capital city,
At
the same time, an emerging working class was organizing and becoming more
militant, with networks of activists emerging and signs of coordinated
industrial action. The number of strikes was still small compared to the size
of the working class, and independent union organization was weak. Most strikes
were about very limited demands. Still, the trend was there.
Before
July 27, there was already a pattern of unrest, with street demonstrations in
The
repression that followed was effective for a while, but the 1997 election
campaign allowed hostility to the regime to show itself again under the guise
of election campaigning. With Megawati sidelined, few wanted to support her
party, so mass opposition focused on rallies by the remaining token opposition
party, the United Development Party (PPP). Huge crowds took to the streets a
number of times, gridlocking the capital and other
cities, and towards the end there was street fighting. These actions combined
support for Megawati and for the star symbolizing the PPP; this “Mega-Star”
alliance showed that mass hostility was mounting against the regime.
The
one thing Suharto still had going for him was the grudging recognition that he
had presided over economic growth: He was the “Father of Development.” But at
the end of 1997, the Asian crisis brought development to a shuddering halt.
At
first the economic crisis dampened the struggle, because so many people were
focused entirely on survival. Then a new rhythm of revolt began, based on new
social contradictions. For a time, most of the upheavals around the country
took the deeply ambiguous form of riots, mostly with a big anti-Chinese
component. Chinese families, in league with the military, control big chunks of
the economy. This allows the government and the military to deflect hostility
in their direction in times of crisis.
The
mood of hope had changed to desperation. Often riots began as protests over
some outrage committed by the police or army, but they were repeatedly diverted
by provocateurs into looting and attacks on Chinese immigrants. Political
demonstrations were mostly token affairs. It was not until March 1998 that the
students began to mount a genuinely political protest movement. This quickly
became a mass movement, with regular demonstrations at even the most
conservative universities, such as
The
student movement began with rallies inside the campuses, where it was
relatively safe. Then they started trying to get into the streets, but were
usually stopped by the security forces. The resulting clashes provoked new street
fighting, so that the authorities could argue against street marches on the
grounds that they caused riots. Many students accepted this.
The
student movement had other weaknesses. It was moralistic, and often the
students organized in isolation from other forces. There were those who hoped
to somehow inspire the rest of the population, but there was little concept of
building concrete links. Most were affected by the image–propagated by the
regime over many years–that the students were a “pure” moral force not to be
corrupted by mixing with others. Still they had some impact in society. In late
April, the workers, who had been largely quiescent in the face of mass
unemployment, began to strike. It wasn’t a mass strike movement, and it wasn’t
always political, but it added to the rhythm.
Economic
crisis
The
Asian economic crisis was rich in ironies. For years the experts had hyped the
economic boom, portraying local political and industrial leaders as miracle
workers, while hot money poured into the Southeast Asian region. Only the
Japanese fund managers were cautious; in fact they began pulling out as early
as 1995. The rest abruptly followed in 1997, after the “tiger economies” showed
signs of declining competitiveness and over-capacity. As Harvard economist
Jeffrey Sachs said, “Euphoria turned to panic without missing a beat. Suddenly,
Initially,
capitalist pundits and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) thought that
Suharto
invited the IMF to prop up the economy and then spent months trying to avoid
implementing its demands. The regime announced that some major projects would
be shelved, but they reappeared in a new guise. The clove monopoly of Tommy
Suharto, the dictator’s son, was supposed to be scrapped; but then it looked
like it was returning in a new form. These games allowed Suharto’s family and
cronies to cling to their assets, but world money markets were hostile.
Unemployment
soared and inflation raced out of control, yet Suharto’s ruthless political
machine handed him another presidential term. Despite the unrest the regime
held firm, mouthing platitudes about reform while arranging the kidnapping and
torture of activists. Armed thugs seized Pius Lustrilanang,
an ally of Megawati and of another liberal reformer, Muslim leader Amien Rais; they also snatched Andi Arief, a prominent member of
the PRD. Pius later surfaced telling of brutal mistreatment. Andi Arief eventually turned up
in police custody, though none of the cops would own up to actually arresting
him.
At
the start of May 1998, Suharto arrogantly announced democratic reform wouldn’t
proceed until 2003. The students were furious; their demonstrations grew. The
public mood hardened perceptibly, as most people concluded reform was only
possible if the dictator fell.
The
student movement blossomed almost everywhere. In the city of
To
build this national movement was a great achievement. The regime had made
campus political activity extremely difficult by imposing an official
organization, the Campus Coordinating Agency, and restricting alternative
groups. Students were to pursue academic goals and shun “practical politics.”
But in 1998 they shrugged this restriction aside, saying their actions had
nothing to do with the rubber stamp electoral system, and thus were technically
not practical politics.
On
May 4, the regime announced it would implement the IMF’s
plan to stop subsidizing fuel and electricity prices. The price of gas would
rise 71 percent immediately, while electricity would go up 60 percent over the
course of the year, on top of all the earlier hardships. Desperately, motorists
queued for the last of the cheap gas, gridlocking
The
press seriously questioned why the subsidies had to be removed. Yes, they cost
a lot of money–Rp 27 billion, but the government had
previously found Rp 103 billion to bail out the banks
owned by its crony friends. The oil industry was earning foreign cash at what
were now fabulous exchange rates, so why couldn’t it give local consumers a
break?
Meanwhile
a wave of strikes broke out in the industrial estates to the west of the
capital. Around 2,000 employees in ceramic and chemical plants in Tangerang and Serang stopped work
demanding wage increases to keep up with inflation. Twelve hundred workers at
On
the surface this seemed unrelated to the political unrest. However, it had
become very hard for workers to strike due to mass unemployment. The fact that
such actions were now occurring suggested the political struggles were having a
flow-on effect. Within days, there were further signs. Around 2,000 medical
staff from the
Suharto
falls
The
ferment was so great, even craven timeservers in parliament began debating
issues and criticizing the government, looking for all the
world like genuine representatives of the people.
When
I heard the news I went to Trisakti. Thousands of
students had gathered for what was both an act of
mourning and a political rally. Delegations arrived from other campuses as did
every prominent figure of the democracy movement. Megawati spoke (the first
time she had said a word about the months of protests) along with Amien Rais. Both pleaded for
non-violence, but the situation had gone too far for that.
Students
began to drift into the streets. Here they were joined by workers, the
unemployed and the poor. The police marched up and street fighting began; I
tasted tear gas for the first time since 1969. Around
Finally
the dictatorship cracked. Thirty thousand students invaded the parliament and
the authorities made no effort to kick them out. No government accepts such a
thing unless it’s on the ropes. The media defied the censors, and coverage of
the riots was extremely frank. Newspapers held back from editorials calling
directly for the president’s resignation, but the press did begin to discuss
the Suharto regime in highly critical and sometimes insulting terms. And
foreign businesses took to their heels. Economics professor Anwar
Nasutian lamented:
The [foreign] factory managers have all
gone, expert staff have fled, so have the people with the money, there is a
capital flight. Now who will be willing to come to
What
had been a widespread but still diffuse yearning for change became a national
consensus. My personal friends said the same things as hardened political
activists. So did people in the street. Even soldiers told me: Suharto has to
go. Parliamentary speaker Harmoko, his home burnt to
ashes in the riots, called on the dictator to quit. Members of parliament
backed an extraordinary parliamentary session to seek Suharto’s resignation.
Thirteen ministers quit.
At
Because we are like a flowing river
and you are a stone without a heart
the water will wear away the stone.
On
May 21, 1998, with students occupying the parliament building and riots in the
streets, the dictator resigned. Rendra’s prophecy was
fulfilled. What brought down Suharto was not the politics of prosperity and
middle-class lobbying, but the politics of crisis and mass upheaval.
The
limits of May
Who
led the May events? To the extent anyone provided progressive political
leadership in May, it was certainly the students. Everyone sympathized with
them, they offered the only political arguments with wide impact and the first
of the
But
the May unrest was only partly an uprising. Yes, there were sensational actions
directed against the government. But it also involved race riots, rapes and
apolitical mass looting, and a significant amount of it was orchestrated. A
leftist observer, Vedi Hadiz,
wrote to me that “from where I was, I could see truckloads of looters going
back and forth on the toll roads, and it would have been terribly easy for one
military vehicle to have stopped them at either end. One looter even asked me
the way back to
Why
was this possible? Because the students didn’t provide
leadership to the wider community. As an analysis written by activists
in Solo explained, “the student movement with a vision of overthrowing Suharto
during February—May in the big cities still had a romantic and exclusive
character. That is, it stuck to its political identity as a student movement
and relied on the campus as a site of struggle.” (Solo itself was an exception,
they said.) Another sympathetic Indonesian writer lamented that there was
insufficient “people power” because “the student protest was too much insulated
as a ‘moral force.’” Similarly, a writer who was at the parliament when the
dictator fell, to be replaced by Vice President Bacharuddin
Jusuf Habibie (an eccentric
technocrat), wrote in her diary:
The fact is they [the students] are poorly
coordinated and are not by and large disciplined activists. They have no true
militants and many of them are particularly young and not savvy. The radio
broadcast some of their comments about Habibie’s
cabinet appointments. They were favorable about some
of them, showing they weren’t clear in their opposition to the entire systematic
charade.
Reform or revolution?
The
term revolution was little used during May, except as a bogey. The dominant
view was that “reformasi” was needed to prevent a
revolution (which would be violent, ugly and destructive). In late 1998 this
changed for a time.
In
the aftermath of Suharto’s fall, the student movement was in disarray. Students
had campaigned single-mindedly against the dictator, without much thought to
the aftermath. Moreover, many of the students had seen themselves as a morally pure elite which should stay away from
practical politics–a mentality cynically encouraged by the regime which
flattered them while trying to undermine them. Now they suddenly confronted a
new government claiming to implement reform. After a fairly short lull, they
returned to the streets, now calling for “total reform,” but their numbers were
comparatively small and the student groups were split.
In
Students
were divided over how political to be (as opposed to the “moral force” idea),
over loose structures versus organized leadership, over non-violence and over
attitudes to the forthcoming special parliamentary session which was to lay
down ground rules for the 1999 elections. Some initially had high hopes for the
session (in May, after all, they’d demanded it be held immediately). Others
were conditionally supportive, while the left wing was arguing to reject the
whole affair, because the parliament was just a Suharto hangover. Arguments
over these issues got heated, and at one demo on November 9 the more radical
students pulled down one of KAMMI’s banners.
Finally,
as the special session approached, the students moved toward a consensus around
three demands. Two were well established by late October: Put Suharto on trial
and end the military’s role in politics. The third, which still required much
debate, was for accelerating democratization–here everyone agreed in principle,
but not on specifics. By October 28, when 10,000 or so rallied on the Day of
the Oath of the Youth (a historic date in the national independence struggle),
the center and left of the movement was able to unite
under the banner of an umbrella group AKRAB (People’s United Action–”akrab” also means “friendly, intimate”). The name not only
implied unity but also an orientation to “the people,” a significant
development in itself. The students were ready to mobilize the wider
population.
In
the week beginning Monday, November 9, demonstrations against the special
session began. The movement was nationwide, but I will stick to events in
By
mid-week, tens of thousands of students were marching through the city streets.
Much larger numbers of local people gathered at street corners to cheer them
on, many joining the march or running ahead of it to confront police. So united
and well organized were the students that they could split up and hold more
than one march, yet eventually converge again at the parliament. There were
many stirring tales; here is one I received by e-mail:
2 pm: The mass action arrives at Jatinegara, its numbers reaching around 100,000. The
military blocks the road with four trucks and a line of soldiers. The military
commander asks for negotiations…. When leader of the demonstration won’t
negotiate and gives an ultimatum…. Within five minutes the march will break
through the barricade…. Thousands of students chant “oppose! oppose!
forward! forward! forward!”…. The security forces remove the trucks and
troops. The march, by now 150,000 strong, marches on chanting “The people
united will never be defeated.”
Later
in front of the parliament, the military is too strong, and the demonstrators
can’t break through. Confrontations ensue: tear gas, rubber bullets, street
fighting. “Along the slow lane of the toll road a thousand students calling
themselves the Jakarta Front arrive chanting ‘revolution or death’ and singing ‘if
you want a revolution, join us’.”
An
issue that illustrates a number of problems and possibilities is the third
demand of the movement: Replace the existing parliament with some kind of
transitional democratic regime. In the early stages, students prodded the four
best known liberal democrats (Megawati, Amien Rais, the Sultan of Yogyakarta and the popular but
eccentric Muslim figure, Abdurrahman Wahid) into meeting and making a common
statement. The right wing of the movement hoped these four would take the
initiative and demand an immediate transfer of power. This they refused to do,
making only vague demands such as a gradual elimination of the military’s
political role. The students then generally forgot about the “Cinganjur group,” as they were known, and relied on direct
action. Yet ambiguities remained about their demands.
Forkot and FAMRED
called for an Indonesian People’s Committee to take power, whereas the PRD and
KOMRAD called for a People’s Council elected from the grassroots. Many students
and most of the wider population would still have expected figures like the Ciganjur group to lead such a transitional vehicle. On the
other hand, some were also open to the PRD’s argument
that the People’s Council should be the peak of a much bigger movement
consisting of councils of workers, communities, student, artists and peasants,
which would in turn be based on local committees. While this wasn’t the same as
workers’ councils based in industry, the PRD clearly wanted some kind of “dual
power.” All these ideas were light years ahead of the consciousness of May.
Debate continued about them for some time after 1998, but unfortunately as the
movement subsided they had less basis in reality.
Compromised
though he was by his links to the old regime, Habibie
still presided over significant changes to the political system. He cut back
the military’s parliamentary representation, divided the military and police
into separate structures and held the first free elections since the 1950s. The
results resolved surprisingly little. Megawati’s vote topped 30 percent; Suharto’s
old party Golkar, with its roots deep in the state
machinery, got over 20 percent. Finishing third with about 13 percent was the
National Awakening Party, based on the huge Muslim organization Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and led by
Abdurrahman Wahid, popularly known as Gus Dur. There were a number of smaller
parties. These results shaped the new People’s Representative Assembly.
Electing
the president fell to the wider People’s Consultative Assembly (functioning as electoral college and vehicle for constitutional change)
where unelected “functional” delegates including the military had more weight.
While on the face of it Megawati should have won, old-guard elements feared her
as the champion of democracy and reform, and some Muslim groups opposed a female
president. Fierce horse-trading brought Wahid to power.
Wahid
was likeable but erratic. His presidency was unstable and hopes that he would
introduce further reforms were largely disappointed. He promised the people of
Aceh, long oppressed by
At
this point most of the Indonesian left, ranging from NGOs to the PRD*, rallied
behind him and against Megawati. They argued that a transition from Wahid to
Megawati was linked to rightward trends in society as a whole. They pointed to
right-wing military, religious and bureaucratic groups behind the push to dump
Wahid, and to Megawati’s links with sections of the military. They rallied
outside the Presidential Palace, calling on Wahid to issue a decree dissolving
parliament before it could remove him.
Yes,
there was a link between the attacks on Wahid and those on democracy; but what
was its nature? If we ask which president brought in the most democratic
change, surely it is Habibie. Not because he
represented more progressive forces, but because in November 1998 the mass
struggle of the students and urban poor was at its height. As that struggle
subsided, society drifted rightwards and reactionary elements raised their
heads. They did use Megawati; but hadn’t the same people backed Wahid in 1999?
Megawati
does have closer ties to the military; traditionally her father’s party cadres
came from similar provincial Javanese backgrounds to many officers. But Wahid
is closer to the Suharto family, which is still a force, and Wahid actually
appeared with the dictator on TV in the dying days of his rule.
Wahid,
Megawati and Habibie are all essentially similar
capitalist politicians, members of the same social elite. The leftists who
supported Wahid had confused cause and effect. And their calls for a decree
dissolving parliament were extremely dangerous, given that he could only have
done that with the help of the military. Relatively few left activists
thoroughly understood the need for a political stand independent of all
capitalist politicians.
Since
2001, Megawati and her backers have consolidated their position to a degree.
The left has declined and fragmented, and in the wake of September 11 and
Megawati’s increasing cooperation with
There
is potential for struggle, and much to fight about. The question remains: Can
the Indonesian left seize the opportunities.
[* The PRD leadership insisted it did not actually back
Wahid or support the decree. They acknowledged, however that many of their members
interpreted party statements as meaning that, and acted accordingly.]
2. Issues on the Indonesian left
Given the depth of the capitalist
crisis, and the hunger for new ideas, it isn’t surprising that I have met a lot
of people interested in socialism in
The dominant orientation was a
two-stage strategy. First there would be a democratic revolution to get rid of
all the existing dictatorial features, such as the military’s “dual function”
that allows it to intervene in politics. Then, using the expanded “democratic
space,” the way would be open to launch a struggle for socialism.
The more theoretically inclined
based this approach on Vladimir Lenin’s Two
Tactics of Social Democracy. Few
knew that in 1917 Lenin effectively abandoned the two-stage approach of Two Tactics, and with the publication of
the “April Theses” moved to a conception close to Trotsky’s theory of permanent
revolution. I circulated what was apparently the first-ever Indonesian language
edition of the “April Theses.”
It’s true that initially, both
Marx (during the 1848 revolutions) and Lenin thought a prior democratic stage
was needed. This was because they were operating in semi-feudal societies. They
thought a transition to capitalism was needed to lay the basis for socialism,
and part of that was the establishment of bourgeois parliamentary democracy.
Even so, they saw the working class as the key revolutionary force, and pointed
to the cowardice of the bourgeoisie. And in any case, everyone agrees that
The argument for a “democratic
stage” today is vaguer. It effectively says conditions aren’t ripe for a
socialist struggle, so a democratic struggle is all that’s possible. This view
is based on real and important facts. The word socialism, let alone communism,
scares a lot of people. The left forces are still weak, and relatively isolated
from the workers and peasants. Under these conditions, it’s dangerous to carry
out socialist propaganda openly.
Moreover, the labor
movement is still underdeveloped–a crucial point, since the whole argument for
socialism relies on workers’ potential not only to struggle, but to take and
hold power. There is a huge working class of up to 80 million people. Yet so
far, government-backed “yellow unions,” entrenched during the long years of
dictatorship, have the most members. Unions independent of the state have only
organized a minority.
For Marxists the working class is
crucial. Peasants may be more numerous in some parts of the
In
Others argue for orienting to the
urban poor. Sections of the left periodically turn in this direction after
disappointments in organizing workers. For example, it was pointed out to me
that when radical trade unionist Dita Sari went on trial in 1996, few workers
came to the court to support her.
The argument is that the workers
are not yet politicized, whereas the urban poor are potentially explosive.
There is something in this. The urban poor did provide the mass base for the
sensational struggles of November 1998. Moreover, we shouldn’t see them as just
shiftless vagrants; this category includes pedicab
drivers, buskers [street entertainers], even some bus
drivers–groups with a certain degree of organization who would take part in the
labor movement if it were stronger. In fact, two
young buskers were on the platform at the 1999 Jakarta May Day rally. The
trouble is that the urban poor are unstable, hard to organize and can be all
too easily mobilized by bourgeois liberal or reactionary elements too. After
all, who provides the mass base for Megawati’s rallies, and also for race
riots?
If you think primarily in terms of
a limited democratic struggle, orienting to the urban poor might make sense. But
as soon as you think in socialist terms, the problems with this element are
obvious.
“But the workers are backward,”
say experienced and dedicated labor organizers, so we
have to listen. Why do they say this? “The workers don’t watch TV, they don’t
read newspapers, they’re stuck out on the urban fringe, they
still have ties to the village environment.” OK, that’s true up to a point.
Even so, these realities don’t need to be so discouraging.
It’s important to remember that
the working class is not just factory hands. Until recently, it’s true, white
collar employees didn’t identify themselves as workers–however the crisis has
begun to change that. At the 1999 May Day, a representative of the bank
employees’ union (which arose because of mass layoffs) declared his members to
be part of the working class. Still, the factories are very important.
I said to the comrades: Maybe
factory workers don’t own individual TVs, but there are TVs in the warung (cheap eating places) or they can visit friends, and
this is a collective environment where they can discuss what they see. Surely
they can afford to buy one newspaper and share it around? “Yes,” they replied, “but
they switch off the news and turn to the soaps. They buy women’s magazines, not
newspapers.”
Let’s assume it’s
all true. In the midst of a terrible crisis and widespread political ferment,
why do workers behave this way? Because “politics” as commonly understood is
remote from their lives. If you have to work 10 hours a day for a pittance,
there is little time and energy left to think about “democracy,” so long as
this means nothing more than parliamentarism. After
all, parliamentary democracy is unlikely to improve their wages or conditions.
The main political demand with
resonance among workers is the call to get the military out of politics. That’s
because they have direct experience of how the army attacks their strikes.
Workers are not really indifferent to politics. We just have to make it
relevant. That’s why specifically socialist politics are so important, because
we take the workers’ needs and struggles as our starting point.
Which is not to
say we’ll be able to win the great majority of workers to socialist ideas in
the short run. Because of the weight of
capitalist oppression and ideology, workers in any country are “backward” until
they move into struggle. It’s a question initially of winning a minority, even
a quite small minority at first. These can then begin to win over others.
Arguing for socialism
It’s also true that the term “socialist”
makes a lot of Indonesians nervous, largely due to the legacy of the extreme
anti-communism of the Suharto era. To overcome this with workers, or most other
people, we have to make our politics concrete and show their immediate
relevance. The Marxist tradition offers many examples of how to do it.
The 1848 revolutions taught Marx
that the bourgeois liberals couldn’t be trusted and that a specifically
socialist struggle was needed, but he also understood the need to develop it
out of the existing movement. He tried to take liberal democratic slogans and
give them a socialist twist. Indonesian revolutionaries can do the same today;
in fact the People’s Democratic Party (PRD) took a step in this direction after
Suharto fell. To the common democratic demand to put him on trial, they added
the slogan: “Nationalize the wealth of Suharto and his cronies!” That makes
sense to most people, given that the wealth comes from corruption and theft. It’s
a democratic demand, yet in practice it opens up socialist possibilities.
The way is then open to argue
further: If all the businesses of the Suharto family and its cronies are to be
nationalized, who will run them? Given that everyone is for democracy, why not
have the workers run them democratically? It isn’t so hard to work socialism
into practical agitation for democracy and reform.
If the left just argues for
democracy, it can end up making serious compromises. Consider the 1999
elections. The PRD ran candidates, which I thought was a reasonable strategy,
but highly controversial on the left.
The PRD’s
critics accused them of legitimizing the system. They had “accepted” the
elections, despite all their objectionable features such as a continuing
military presence in parliament, vote rigging and high levels of corruption.
How could they make this compromise? The PRD, in turn, insisted they did not
accept the elections. Their election platform was anti-electoral. “Even if we’re
elected, we won’t accept the outcome.”
Surely this missed the point. I
put it to comrades that in
This is one of the ways in which
the two-stage theory (democracy now, socialism later) politically disarms the
revolutionary movement.
Faced with arguments about the
need to introduce elements of socialist politics into the struggle today,
hardly anyone directly disagreed. On the contrary, quite a few said this is
precisely what they try to do–in private. They’re trying to combine legal and
illegal work. The legal propaganda can’t go beyond democratic demands, they
say, because of the repressive political climate and a lack of understanding among
the majority of the population. However, among a smaller circle they’re already
explaining that socialist solutions are needed.
Fair enough. I personally feel
their legal propaganda could go a bit farther, but from our position of safety
we have no right to tell them what risks to take. We can’t know just how they
talk to their immediate periphery on a day-to-day basis, but I accept that
quite a bit of education in socialism is taking place. My concern is that the
strategic framework can become a huge obstacle to this effort.
Consider a PRD seminar held in
Solo (
There will be some positive things for ABRI/TNI if the dual
function is abolished, i.e.: “1. ABRN/TNI will be able to develop their
professionalism in safeguarding defense and security
in accordance with the mandate of the Basic Laws [constitution] of 1945.… 2. No
longer will ABRI/TNI be confronting its own people because it is devoted to the
interests of certain groups or powers.
I discussed this with various
people including
Perhaps. Yet the fact remains that this part of the legal
literature reinforces illusions about capitalism, and that the legal
formulations contradict the illegal propaganda. The former will have a much wider
audience, and the revolutionaries will be seen by many to be saying that
bourgeois democracy means a neutral state apparatus. If it’s not possible to
cover these points explicitly in the legal propaganda, fair enough. But why
include in that propaganda formulations that we know are untrue, and which
breed illusions in the capitalist state?
This shows how the two-stage
approach, by establishing in everyone’s mind that democracy is the key thing in
the short run, can tempt us into accepting the logic of bourgeois liberalism.
If we understand that liberal-democratic demands are simply the starting point
for a socialist struggle, this danger recedes.
Organized labor
Ultimately all Marxist
perspectives depend on the power of the working class.
In the 1960s, Indonesian labor was well organized, although there were perhaps no
more than 500,000 industrial workers whereas today there are many millions.
Under Suharto [president from 1967—1998], the old unions were savaged by
repression and then incorporated into government-managed structures. In the
course of the 1990s, attempts were made to create independent unions. The first
attempt was called “Solidarity,” but after one big strike it was repressed. At
the time Suharto fell, there could not have been more than 10,000 members of
independent unions in
The Manpower Department reported
that in January 2002 there were 61 nationally registered union federations, and
beyond that many local union groups. According to an analysis by Poenky Indarti of the human
rights group Kontras, 19 of the national federations
are “old unions” derived from the Suharto-era official union federation.
Another nine have a more complex history related to the Suharto era. Five are
organizations of civil servants, 28 are new unions. The labor
force is estimated around 80 million, with important concentrations of factory
workers on the fringes of the cities of Java, as well as
Based on interviews with leaders
of the 28, she says only eight are “strong and militant enough to speak up not
only about labor welfare but also about labor policy and political issues…such as globalization and
neoliberalization.” Poenky
says many leaders of the 28 are new to the labor
movement, a few of them opportunists.
The most important independent
union is the Indonesian Prosperous Labor Union (SBSI)
long led by Muchtar Pakpahan.
It represents a mixture of social democratic and populist politics. In 1997, when SBSI was still facing Suharto’s repression but able
to maintain a certain above-ground presence, I spoke on socialist politics to a
meeting of their senior cadres, and gained a good picture of where they stood.
I offered a sharp critique of
class collaboration, based around the practical experience of Australian unions
in the Australian “social contract” arrangement known as the Accord. It had
been a disaster for the unions, as many of them now recognize. One of the SBSI
leaders offered a sharp reply of his own, to the effect that European unions
had achieved great things through collaboration with employers and government,
including “access” to management circles. SBSI’s
immediate problem, however is that in
Consequently, SBSI is locked into
many battles for basic union recognition, against victimization, for modest
improvements in wages and conditions and to stabilize its local organizations.
SBSI claims something like a million members, but only a few hundred thousand
of those would be dues-paying.
A very different type of union is
the Indonesian National Federation for Labor
Struggles (FNPBI) whose best known leader is Dita Sari. Its ancestor, the Center for Labor Struggles, broke
up under repression in 1996 and the new body was established from local union
bodies across the country after Suharto fell. The key leaders are PRD members
and they give its agitation a revolutionary flavor.
FNPBI is relatively small, with perhaps 10,000 members, but it maintains a high
political profile both inside and outside the country.
Yet another type of union is the
Greater Jakarta Labor Union (SBJ), also claiming
around 10,000 members, and linked to smaller groups in cities such as
No account would be complete
without mentioning the Maritime and Fisher Union (SBMNI) which has proved able
to shut down
Yet the unions had relatively
little impact on post-Suharto national life until June 2001, when huge demonstrations
centered in the West Java city of
The immediate issue was
ministerial decrees about workers’ rights. The employers were up in arms about
some very modest pension benefits, and had pressured the new labor minister to cut back entitlements. All the unions
protested, even the yellow unions from the Suharto era. They now have to
compete with new workers’ organizations, and are starting to become more active
in the promotion of their members’ interests. Demonstrations began in
President Wahid refused to
retreat, but left a loophole: Provincial governments could stick to the old
arrangements if they chose. Several provincial governments rushed to use this
escape hatch including the one in
It was the former yellow unions
that initially called the big
At a time when the military is
rebuilding its position in national politics, organized labor
represents the best hope for popular resistance. And if the left can sink roots
in the working class, it represents the best hope for a brighter future.
A note on sources
This article
is based on my experiences in